Archives

428-437 – Ron Prentice, executive director of the California Family Council (californiafamily.org), and chairman of protectmarriage.com, on the intolerance and persecution of those who supported Prop 8.

Scott Eckern, artistic director of the California Musical Theatre, is resigning his post and leaving the organization… Eckern, a 25-year veteran of the theater company, took over as artistic director in 2002 following the retirement of Leland Ball. Eckern was also the company's chief operating officer.

The Web site www.antigayblacklist.com published a list based on data by www.electiontrack.com of anyone who contributed more than $1,000 to the Yes on Proposition 8 campaign. That disclosure led to a surge of calls for a boycott on the theater company…

"I understand that my choice of supporting Proposition 8 has been the cause of many hurt feelings, maybe even betrayal. It was not my intent. I honestly had no idea that this would be the reaction. I chose to act upon my belief that the traditional definition of marriage should be preserved," he said in his statement. "I support each individual to have rights and access and I understood that in California domestic partnerships come with the same rights that come with marriage. My sister is a lesbian and in a committed domestic partnership relationship. I am loving and supportive of her and her family, and she is loving and supportive of me and my family."

When Tony Award-winner Marc Shaiman, the composer of "Hairspray," read of Eckern's donation last week, he urged artists and theater workers across the country to boycott the theater.

The idea of a blacklist and boycott have grown from Shaiman's postings and e-mails. The composer, who is openly gay, said he read about Eckern's contribution to the campaign on the Web site www.datalounge.com, and he felt he had to do something.

"I was so shocked. I'm dealing myself with being legally discriminated against, and then come to find out, I helped put money in his pocket that helped get this proposition passed," Shaiman said in a telephone interview.

In December 2005, John and Furnish tied the knot in a civil partnership ceremony in Windsor, England. But, clarified the singer, "We're not married. Let's get that right. We have a civil partnership. What is wrong with Proposition 8 is that they went for marriage. Marriage is going to put a lot of people off, the word marriage."

John and Furnish, and their two cocker spaniels Marilyn and Arthur, were in town for Monday's annual benefit for the Elton John AIDS Foundation.

"I don't want to be married. I'm very happy with a civil partnership. If gay people want to get married, or get together, they should have a civil partnership," said John. "The word marriage, I think, puts a lot of people off. You get the same equal rights that we do when we have a civil partnership. Heterosexual people get married. We can have civil partnerships."

512-523 – Father Frank Pavone, whose program "Life on the Line" airs Sundays at 3pm, is responsible for coordinating the Vatican's global pro-life strategy, and does so as the national director of Priests for Life (priestsforlife.org), the president of the National Pro-Life Religious Council, and he serves on Dr. James Dobson's Focus on the Family Institute.

Obama to Issue Anti-Life Orders on Day 1 - John Podesta, Obama's chief administrator, told the Associated Press that Obama will act quickly through executive orders to reverse the Mexico City Policy, which prohibits federal funding of organizations that promote or perform abortions overseas. He will dispense with measures in President Bush's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), in which health workers are trained to emphasize abstinence and marital fidelity as the most effective ways to combat the spread of AIDS - and emphasize Planned Parenthood-style comprehensive sex education, condom distribution, etc. He will reverse the Bush ban on federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research ( ESCM ) that restricts funding to a limited number of stem cell lines that were already in existence at the time of Bush's order.

FRC 's Dr. David Prentice, who closely follows the science and discovery in the field, has repeatedly demonstrated that the destruction of human embryos for research is ineffective and therefore not worthy of government funding.Adult stem cell technologies, on the other hand, are nearly identical to embryonic cells, except for two things: first, they do not produce tumors as do cells that are taken from human embryos, and therefore are capable of being used for effective therapeutic purposes; second, they do not require the destruction of human embryos.

'God is dead," Friedrich Nietzsche declared in Thus Spake Zarathustra and The Gay Science, two of his nineteenth-century assaults upon the established moral order.

"God is not great," Christopher Hitchens decrees in his tome of the same title released last year.

"Stop!" Herb London shouts, as he stands athwart history in his new book, America's Secular Challenge: The Rise of a New National Religion, published this autumn by Encounter Books. In it, he takes on the high priests and acolytes of radical secularism, which he deems to be an emerging national faith. Such an ideology elevated to the level of religious doctrine poses a grave threat to the West, London, the president of the Hudson Institute, properly asserts. This is true of extreme secularism in and of itself, but even more so when it is juxtaposed against the designs of one of our mortal enemies, militant Islamism.